Only two actual songs are included here, a pair of sacred settings dating from 1916 (very late in Rachmaninov’s life as a song-writer) sung with great fervour by the admirable Joan Rodgers. But the idea of song runs through much else in a collection of rarities bound to interest all lovers of Rachmaninov. Several of the items are actually entitled “Romance”, romans being the French-inspired Russian word for an art-song of the kind that delighted 19th-century St Petersburg salons. The A minor piece for violin and piano seems to date from the 1880s, and is pleasantly in the salon manner of Rachmaninov’s admired Tchaikovsky; the Op 6 Morceaux de salon consist of an impassioned violin song and an invigorating piece of gypsy fiddling; and the first of two surviving movements of a string quartet (the second is a quick-witted piece of near- Borodin) has all Rachmaninov’s mature melodic elegance. The much-arranged Vocalise, of course, began life as a wordless song. The recordings have a suitably intimate, vivid presence, as if the excellent Olding and Ashkenazy were addressing their gathering personally, and with a smile.

The Second String Quartet is a more substantial piece of work, or would be if Rachmaninov had completed it. He left part of only two movements, and these have been completed by editors. The Andante is particularly interesting, using, unexpectedly for Rachmaninov, a six-note ground bass on which he builds a powerful structure that, as the insert note suggests, has something of the intensity of The Isle of the Dead. One almost expects him to find room for his beloved “Dies irae” theme. Olding and Ashkenazy have a lot of fun with Rachmaninov’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Gopak to round off a a disc of real curiosities.